24 Hour Party People

After the disappointment of The Parole Officer, Steve Coogan's movie career now makes a modest but distinct advance. In Michael Winterbottom's new movie, shot on digital video by cinematographer Robby Muller in a funky faux-doc/collage style, he portrays Tony Wilson, the Factory records supremo behind Manchester's exploding music scene from the late 1970s to the early 1990s: secret midwife to the birth of Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays. Coogan inevitably turns this figure into a Partridgean character, with his prickly, pseudo-intellectual tantrums and preening self-importance. When Shaun Ryder swaggers into the Hacienda and gigglingly fires a revolver into the mirror behind the bar, Wilson snaps: "You could have had someone's eye out!" Very Alan.

What makes Coogan's casting such a good idea is that despite yearning to be a Warhol-style visionary, Wilson never felt confident enough to give up his day job as a Granada TV presenter. So in between the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll he interviewed Sir Keith Joseph, MC'd game shows, and did regional news slots about elephants (and in so doing, ironically resembled no one so much as the late Bill Grundy).

This is reasonably entertaining stuff - but haven't we seen and heard it all before? It makes no serious attempt to find convincing or compelling human stories behind the legends, and Tony Wilson himself, despite intelligently low-key playing from Coogan, is never more than two-dimensional. Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland showed us the power and emotional directness of which he is capable. For all the frenetic activity, this has nothing like the same energy or coherence.